


What To Expect When You’re Cutting Out Your Own Death

by InsectKin



Category: Deathless - Catherynne M. Valente
Genre: F/M, a guide for the curious, in a different iteration, written by marya
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:34:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28881030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InsectKin/pseuds/InsectKin
Summary: A brief guide to the process and perils of achieving immortality.





	What To Expect When You’re Cutting Out Your Own Death

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when I'm assigned a 2nd person future exercise in a writing class while doing a Deathless reread and also pregnant. Hope you enjoy!

You will be paralyzed by the loss. You will experience the sensation of your internals expelling themselves, the belief that your organs have gone missing. You will claw at the now-empty place in your chest. You will peel at your skin, searching for something that was as familiar and unnoticed to you as your heartbeat, something that you didn’t realize was there until it’s gone.

You will have lived your life with a man who thinks of you as a girl though you will have been able to pass for his mother for some time. After years of begging him to cut out your death, to stop the wrinkles that fan your glass-limned eyes as his own stay smooth – after years of his refusal, you will have decided to take matters into your own creased hands. You will have asked every demon and domovoi for help, will have been rebuffed every time. You will have found a black bound book of secrets, a knife with no blade; you will have realized that only by stealing back your will and forging it to a barb will you be able to drag the death from your body.

Even with a decade of preparation, you will not be prepared. The first stab of the will-blade into your chest will freeze you like fire. You will feel like your bones have turned to ice – your nerves will be startling and stampeding, confused. You won’t have realized all the miniature deaths you’d died up until that point, the small casualties that stack together like a nesting doll. You will feel like every cell in your body is splitting in two – this is because they will be. You will feel worse before you feel better.

You will learn to live with the loss. It will curl up inside you like the snake of your stomach. But there will never be another moment awake or asleep (though you won’t sleep much anymore) when you are not aware of where your death used to be. How else will you feel so alive, if you aren’t attuned of the gaping absence of your death?

But first you will realize that the demons were right not to help you, that a life without a death is almost not a life at all. By then it will be too late, of course. But the deathless man you live with will have told you that already.


End file.
